Farmer-Led Research
Research reports are written by Practical Farmers staff to ensure consistency and quality, and are available to view or download for free.
The Latest Research from PFI
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Iowa row crop farmers discovered flame cultivation several years ago. However, it’s something new to the state’s vegetable farmers. Gary and Nancy Guthrie, Nevada, decided to see what it could do for carrots. The Guthrie operation is just …
This has been our second season using Washburn’s economic analysis tool with our data. This tool was shared in a 1998 Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference Workshop. The workshop was presented by two farms – Spring Hill Farm …
Angela Tedesco’s Turtle Farm, near Granger, feeds CSA members in the Des Moines area. She produces abundant vegetable crops – and usually a good crop of cucumber beetles. Angela writes: “This cucumber beetle trial was an attempt to …
Solon members Jeff and Susan Zacharakis-Jutz and their children maintain sheep and dairy goat herds that they raise using a minimum of synthetic chemicals. They find internal parasites to be one of the more difficult challenges to manage …
What is the most profitable way to supplement the rations of milking cows that are being rotationally grazed? There is little consensus among those who graze. Our trial this year was devised to shed some light on this …
Readers of the PFI newsletter may remember that in 1998 the organization received a grant from the USDA SARE program to evaluate “fertility paradigms.” Paradigms are ways of looking at the world, constructions that we put on reality …
Gary and Nancy Guthrie, Nevada, raise vegetables for their own CSA (community supported agriculture), Growing Harmony Farm. As the son of a corn entomologist, Gary keeps a particular eye on challenges from the insect world. In their organic …
Jeff Klinge and Deb Tidwell, Farmersburg, have documented the economics of cropping as they transitioned to organic production. Jeff’s reports have appeared in these PFI annual publications, but in the past the “conventional” comparison came from his own …
The PFI on-farm research program has seen a resurgence of nitrogen trials with the addition of cooperators associated with the Iowa Farm Bureau. Not that we got nitrogen all figured out with the first 70 replicated trials! Yes, …
Dennis and Eve Abbas, Hampton, carried out a trial that may not look like a fertility experiment. They compared two planting populations of corn, looking for effects on nitrogen sufficiency. This was the second year of the trial. …
It has been nearly a decade since the rise in interest in strip intercropping, led in part by PFI. A reason many producers discontinued intercropping was the system’s failure to consistently deliver the yield benefits inherent in that …
The Dordt College Agricultural Stewardship Center continued in 1999 its comparison of three kinds of corn hybrid: a well-known commercial hybrid, its Bt-gene cousin, and an inexpensive hybrid from a local seed company (Table 7, click to view). …
